The next week was devoted to students working on a project that would provide hands-on application of the program. If needed, the teacher would demonstrate additional features of the program to help better student understanding. The following week would be devoted to a new unit and the previous assignment involving the website program would be due. For units involving educational concepts such as Internet safety, where new technologies did not need to be learned, one week was taken to provide resources on the topic and discussion with the assignment for that unit being due the following week.
Measurement Instrument
For this study we chose to adapt the Classroom Community Scale (CCS), developed by Rovai, in order to collect the necessary SOC data. The original scale from Rovai consisted of 20 items split equally into two subscales: the connectedness subscale and the learning subscale (Rovai, 2002b). A factor analysis of this scale performed by Rovai confirmed that the overall results of using the scale reflected the classroom community construct.
In order to better fit our specific objectives on measuring connections and trust, and to avoid student survey fatigue, we only used the connectedness subscale, and altered some of the items to better reflect the context of our course. For example, the item “I feel uncertain about others in this course” was too broad and vague for our context. It was altered to “I could share ideas on projects with others without being criticized” in order to measure a specific example of trust and connectedness with others. A seven-point response scale was used to allow for greater variance and to match other formative evaluation items asked of the students, instead of the five-point scale originally proposed by Rovai. One item was added to the survey that directly addressed the learner’s opinion on how important SOC is in the class. This item was not designed to measure the participants’ sense of connectedness and is thus not included in our connectedness score; however, responses to this item are included below to provide additional context within each iteration. These modifications were made prior to collecting data and were consistent throughout this study. Our adapted CCS is found in Table 2.